In the growing catalog of tech deplatormings of ordinary conservative discourse, the late great deplatforming of the Claremont Institute by Google is merely ordinary in its mindlessness.
Claremont has been advertising to its supporter base
I will tell you, based on my own experience with millennials in tech.
They know nothing! Except what they have been carefully taught, to hate and to fear, by their lefty teachers in school and their lefty instructors in university. They have absolutely anodyne opinions that conform eerily to New York Times conventional wisdom.
Correction. I was talking to a millennial yesterday who had actually taken some philosophy courses. He sounded like he had his head on straight. Or maybe he was just being nice to an old geezer.
So when these foolish, uneducated millennials are given jobs to moderate internet speech they have no understanding of politics except what they were carefully taught by their lefty instructors.
So of course, the uneducated millennials are outraged by a chap like James Damore that produces an anodyne essay on women in tech. How dare he? Really, how can any man produce stuff that goes against the narrative that they have been carefully taught? A la lanterne! As the French said during the revolution.
And of course the uneducated millennials are outraged by an outfit like Claremont that exists to challenge the lefty conventional wisdom, and particularly the lefty conventional wisdom on sex and race.
Because the whole point of the "education" they received from their lefty instructors from K thru grad school is to make them into ideological foot-soldiers for the lefty march through the institutions.
Just saying. The whole point of classical studies in the university, what they used to call "Greats" in Oxford and Cambridge in Limeyland, was to educate the scions of the ruling class in politics and philosophy and the Greek and Roman classic texts so that they knew all the angles of governance before they entered the political arena. The ruling class of that era knew that to merely indoctrinate their young scions of privilege in ruling class ideology wouldn't do the trick -- wouldn't keep the ruling class in power. The next generation had to know the ground. Of course, come the day they would know how to advance the agenda of the ruling class. That goes without saying. But they also knew how the world worked.
Now I believe that the purely ideological training -- what you might call ideological boot camp -- that the left propagates in the university and in the tech censorship bureaus -- is a strategic mistake.
See, I think the reason for free speech and the tolerance for crazies on the other side of the political spectrum is that if you censor and deplatform the opposition you are merely creating a head of rebellion that will eventually come and bite you.
That is the meaning of my maxim: there is not such thing as justice, only injustice. To put it another way, justice is merely the situation after the removal of an injustice. Until the next injustice comes along.
But the young millennial good little boys and good little girls at the tech censorship bureaus know nothing about that. Because all they know is the moral and ethical rightness of erasing all "hate speech" and racist sexist homophobic horror from the world. To make it a safe-space. As they were carefully taught.
And apparently it takes the intervention of a quasi-adult "Acting Director of Political and Stakeholder Outreach" to stop the millennial crazies in the tech censorship bureaus from their mindless Inquisitions and auto-da-fés before they get the tech parent into serious trouble.
But it shouldn't take an article in the Wall Street Journal to get the tech censorship bureau to curb its enthusiasm for ideological totalitarianism.
Unfortunately, it is getting to be pretty obvious that we are not going to put an end to this foolishness, these cadres of mindless millennial ideological shock troops, without a train wreck.
And that's a shame because it means that tons of people are going to go over the side before we get to right the ship of state.
And I think I may be finding a helpful angle on it from John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards. He proposes an opposition between reason and Heroes. I think he means that the suppression of of human agency in the notion of reason, a flatland of calculation and logic, brings forth the egoistic Hero -- the Napoleon, the Marx, the Marcuse, the activist -- as its Hegelian antithesis.
And that is a bad thing, because in the land of myth that has been revived in the last 100 years by Jung and others, the Hero is supposed to be a sacrificial hero, who goes down into the underworld of the unconscious to learn about the borderland between Order and Chaos and only returns to the everyday world when he has become sadder and wiser.
It is clear to me that our peaceful protesters and activists are Egos that have not experienced the necessary descent into the underworld. And therefore they are monsters that threaten to destroy everything good and true.
Because they are dumb and stupid.
Claremont has been advertising to its supporter base
the danger to the republic posed by multiculturalism, identity politics and politically correct speech restrictions. Google decided that our writings violated the company’s policy on “race and ethnicity in personalized advertising” and prevented us from advertising to our own readers about our 40th-anniversary gala dinner this Saturday.Well, now, after an article in the Wall Street Journal, Google has reversed its ban.
Google’s Acting Director of Political and Stakeholder Outreach got in touch with the Claremont Institute to notify us that the labeling of The American Mind as a “racially oriented publication” was a mistake.What is going on here?
I will tell you, based on my own experience with millennials in tech.
They know nothing! Except what they have been carefully taught, to hate and to fear, by their lefty teachers in school and their lefty instructors in university. They have absolutely anodyne opinions that conform eerily to New York Times conventional wisdom.
Correction. I was talking to a millennial yesterday who had actually taken some philosophy courses. He sounded like he had his head on straight. Or maybe he was just being nice to an old geezer.
So when these foolish, uneducated millennials are given jobs to moderate internet speech they have no understanding of politics except what they were carefully taught by their lefty instructors.
So of course, the uneducated millennials are outraged by a chap like James Damore that produces an anodyne essay on women in tech. How dare he? Really, how can any man produce stuff that goes against the narrative that they have been carefully taught? A la lanterne! As the French said during the revolution.
And of course the uneducated millennials are outraged by an outfit like Claremont that exists to challenge the lefty conventional wisdom, and particularly the lefty conventional wisdom on sex and race.
Because the whole point of the "education" they received from their lefty instructors from K thru grad school is to make them into ideological foot-soldiers for the lefty march through the institutions.
Just saying. The whole point of classical studies in the university, what they used to call "Greats" in Oxford and Cambridge in Limeyland, was to educate the scions of the ruling class in politics and philosophy and the Greek and Roman classic texts so that they knew all the angles of governance before they entered the political arena. The ruling class of that era knew that to merely indoctrinate their young scions of privilege in ruling class ideology wouldn't do the trick -- wouldn't keep the ruling class in power. The next generation had to know the ground. Of course, come the day they would know how to advance the agenda of the ruling class. That goes without saying. But they also knew how the world worked.
Now I believe that the purely ideological training -- what you might call ideological boot camp -- that the left propagates in the university and in the tech censorship bureaus -- is a strategic mistake.
See, I think the reason for free speech and the tolerance for crazies on the other side of the political spectrum is that if you censor and deplatform the opposition you are merely creating a head of rebellion that will eventually come and bite you.
That is the meaning of my maxim: there is not such thing as justice, only injustice. To put it another way, justice is merely the situation after the removal of an injustice. Until the next injustice comes along.
But the young millennial good little boys and good little girls at the tech censorship bureaus know nothing about that. Because all they know is the moral and ethical rightness of erasing all "hate speech" and racist sexist homophobic horror from the world. To make it a safe-space. As they were carefully taught.
And apparently it takes the intervention of a quasi-adult "Acting Director of Political and Stakeholder Outreach" to stop the millennial crazies in the tech censorship bureaus from their mindless Inquisitions and auto-da-fés before they get the tech parent into serious trouble.
But it shouldn't take an article in the Wall Street Journal to get the tech censorship bureau to curb its enthusiasm for ideological totalitarianism.
Unfortunately, it is getting to be pretty obvious that we are not going to put an end to this foolishness, these cadres of mindless millennial ideological shock troops, without a train wreck.
And that's a shame because it means that tons of people are going to go over the side before we get to right the ship of state.
And I think I may be finding a helpful angle on it from John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards. He proposes an opposition between reason and Heroes. I think he means that the suppression of of human agency in the notion of reason, a flatland of calculation and logic, brings forth the egoistic Hero -- the Napoleon, the Marx, the Marcuse, the activist -- as its Hegelian antithesis.
And that is a bad thing, because in the land of myth that has been revived in the last 100 years by Jung and others, the Hero is supposed to be a sacrificial hero, who goes down into the underworld of the unconscious to learn about the borderland between Order and Chaos and only returns to the everyday world when he has become sadder and wiser.
It is clear to me that our peaceful protesters and activists are Egos that have not experienced the necessary descent into the underworld. And therefore they are monsters that threaten to destroy everything good and true.
Because they are dumb and stupid.
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